North West Region: Capacity-building Curbs Newborn Deaths

The Anglophone Crisis and Coronavirus pandemic have left near indelible scars on healthcare provision in the North West and South West Regions. Moreover, insufficient qualified personnel in newborn care has aggravated the situation. With unnecessary infant deaths resulting from preventable causes!

“At the start of the Pandemic Emergency Financing, PEF project in 2020, we identified significant gaps in newborn care that resulted in between 150 and 200 infant deaths annually in the North West Region. The causes were preventable such as prematurity and birth asphyxia,” recalls Dr Ambe Lionel, the Focal Point for Reproductive Health in the North West Region.

Armed with the analysis, Dr Ambe and his team set to work, first by organising workshops on essential newborn care. Participants were personnel from major health facilities in 6 health districts out of the 20 in the region. The six-day training held in two phases, each handling 25 workers. “For the Bamenda Regional Hospital, we involved staff from the intensive care unit and the casualty ward,” Dr Ambe clarifies. “Some participants returned to their stations and replicated the training for their colleagues,” he discloses.

“The results of the workshops were impressive,” Dr Lionel points out. Some 6,000 newborn babies have since received quality healthcare. These include 251 premature newborn babies and 370 low birth weight infants. Similarly, 308 babies – premature and low birth weight alike – have received kangaroo mother care.

With PEF intervention, peri-natal deaths in the North West Region fell from 108 in the period January-March 2021 to 95 in the period April-June 2021. Dr Ambe hastens to explain that staff from just 6 out of the 20 health districts in the N...